Objective: To investigate how donors and government agencies responded to a proliferation of donors providing aid to Ghana’s health sector between 1995 and 2012. Methods: We interviewed 39 key informants from donor agencies, central government and nongovernmental organizations in Accra. These...

Sufficient funding and efficacious technology may be necessary conditions for achieving health gains, but experience in many countries confirms that they are not sufficient. Effective and efficient service delivery is the point at which the potential of the health system to improve lives meets...

This report is a user's guide for defining, measuring, and improving the performance of health service delivery organizations. The authors define six core performance domains: quality, efficiency, utilization, access, learning, and sustainability and provide a compendium of metrics that have...

Background: Concerns about rising health care costs require rigorous economic study to inform clinical and policy decision-making. Micro-costing is a cost estimation methodology employing detailed resource utilization and unit cost data to generate precise estimates of economic costs....

We investigate whether better population health may impact economic performance through improvements in technical efficiency in agricultural production. Using district-level data from India, we employ a random-coefficients approach to estimate a Cobb-Douglas production function, computing...

Background With the exception of key 'proven successes' in global health, the current regime of global health governance can be understood as transnational and national actors pursuing their own interests under a rational actor model of international cooperation, which fails to provide...

Global health scholarship has failed to adequately consider the “BRIC” cluster of nations - Brazil, Russia, India and China - particularly in the aggregate. An article search with the keywords “BRIC” and “public health” yields just one publication. But these countries have a unique...

Objectives: We estimated out-of-pocket health care spending and out-of-pocket spending burden ratio employing household equivalent income in the Republic of Korea. We examined variations in out-of-pocket spending, estimated out-of-pocket spending burden ratio employing household equivalent...

Drug abuse and transmission of HIV during pregnancy are public health problems that adversely affect pregnant women, their children and surrounding communities. Programs that address this vulnerable population have the ability to be cost-effective due to resulting cost savings for mother, child...